I have been using a Samsung Galaxy Young 2 smartphone for more than 2 years but one of the major problems I face on the phone is that it does not show battery percentage on the status bar. For a more accurate reading of the battery level of my phone, I use a battery percentage displaying app but even that is highly inaccurate. The phone shuts off even when the app is showing a 25 percent remaining charge. Are there any good apps without any battery saving features that I could use?— Pratirag Chand

Dear Pratirag,

If you’re phone is rooted, you can easily change the default battery icon of your phone and replace it with one that offers percentage display. Many of the battery percentage apps come bundled with battery saver apps so you might have a difficult time getting one that only displays battery percentage well. There is one app called ‘Battery Notifier (Big Text)’ that shows accurate battery percentage and comes with large text. But if you don’t like the big text of the aforementioned app, you can use an app called ‘MoreQuicklyDock’ and use that to gain accurate readings of your battery percentage. But if your phone is turning off, even when your default battery icon on your status bar displays a decent level of charge, the problem might be hardware more than software. And since you’ve mentioned that you’ve used your phone for more than 2 years, it’s highly likely that your battery might be dying. As you might be aware, Li-Ion batteries have a limited battery life and the more you use it, the more it’ll loose its capacity to hold charge. Once this starts happening, the battery calibration gets skewed and your phone shuts-off even when your phone displays a significant amount of charge. If this is the problem, you might have to replace your battery altogether because your battery is not going to last for very long once it’s started showing these kinds of symptoms.

Can you please suggest a phone under 12000 that I can buy? — Ashish Mishra

Dear Ashish,

There are a lot of phones in the market that cost around that much. The only problem is that they’re, usually, very underpowered and you’ll end up looking for a new phone in a few months. One good option, from a trusted manufacturer, would be the Samsung Galaxy Core Prime.

This phone costs around Rs12,500 and comes with Snapdragon 410 processor with 1GB of RAM. These specifications aren’t bad for a phone in this price range but the Snapdragon 410 is a very underpowered processor that clocks at a mere 1.2GHz maximum.Another phone that I would recommend would be the Android One phone but this phone too suffers from the same performance issues as the Samsung. I would not recommend going for an Indian brand such as Micromax or Xolo phones, for me, they feel very shoddy and have sub-par build-quality. My experience with Micromax phones have been horrendous, both on the hardware side and the software side. So I would not recommending buying an Indian brand phone. Chinese phones are pretty decent and you could look into the Xiaomi Redmi 2 Prime. It’s pretty well built and comes with the great MIUI user-interface. It even has 2GB of RAM even though the processor is still pretty underpowered. If you can invest a bit more, I would recommend going for the Mi4.

The Mi4 is pretty old but because it comes with a high-tiered 800 series processor, it can still hold up, performance —wise, today. The phone costs around Rs 16,000 with festive discounts and compared to the 400 series Snapdragon processor, the older 801 SOC performs much better. So, my recommendation would be to invest a bit more and get the Mi4 if you can. 400 series SOCs are really difficult to recommend.